"geezer" Delbert Tuell instructs volunteers Photo: Jim Wallace

auren Shea, a freshman from Fairfax Station, Virginia, has never met Ted and Kristen Katroscik of Durham. She doesn't know what they look like, whether they are tall or short, thin or stout, black or white. She doesn't know how old they are, whether they listen to jazz or bluegrass, whether they root for Duke or Carolina.

In fact, Shea only knows one thing about the Katrosciks: They need a house to call home. That was all it took to rouse her out of bed early on a Saturday morning to join some fifteen other students on the eight o'clock shift for Blitz Build Duke, a combination house- and consciousness-raising project organized by three seniors in cooperation with Habitat for Humanity of Durham.

The project's name hints at what its organizers hoped to accomplish. Blitz Build Duke involves assembling hundreds of volunteers, then scheduling them in back-to-back shifts to construct a house on an accelerated schedule. In this case, though, the house was to be started on a site on East Campus, in front of the East Duke Building. Over a ten-day period, members of the Duke community, primarily students, would pitch in to complete about 40 percent of the structure, including the roof and all of the exterior and interior walls. The house--1,104 square feet, three bedrooms, and one and a half baths--would then be moved to its permanent location at 1015 Berkeley Street in Walltown, two blocks north of campus. Duke students and other volunteers would continue to work on the house until it is completed, sometime in January.

"I heard about Blitz Build from a friend, and I thought it would be a nice way to spend a Saturday morning," says Shea, who is using bright orange, button-top nails to secure sheathing that will act as a moisture barrier around one of the window openings. "I thought it was pretty incredible students could actually build a house for someone. It's something I've always wanted to do."

Affordable Housing: Community Keystone

So many students have signed up to volunteer that, on Saturday, work shifts were reduced to only an hour each. Shea signed up for the eight-to-nine shift, but it's nearly eleven and she's still there. "What time is it?" she asks, and then, without waiting for an answer, returns to the nail she is trying to drive into the wall. She concentrates hard, gripping the hammer with both hands.

Many students stay beyond their allotted time slot, and still others try to sign up for additional shifts. By the time the on-campus part of the build is over, more than 250 volunteers will have worked on the house--almost all of them students. That is just what the organizers were hoping for when they decided to start the house on campus. The project was viewed, as one organizer puts it, as a way to "jumpstart" students, and freshmen in particular, into engaging with the Durham community through volunteer work.

Skilled sawer: senior Johanna Von Hofe Photo: Jim Wallace

Blitz Build Duke began as a project in a leadership class taught by public policy professor Tony Brown last year. It was the brainchild of Kat Farrell '03, who entrusted it to three juniors--Mandy Anderson, Taylor Hayden, and Kate Henderson--to carry on after she graduated in May. "By putting it on East Campus, we have this really easy way to get kids involved and get them excited about a project, and then have them move off campus and continue that work and that excitement in Durham," says Anderson. She was volunteer coordinator for the project; Henderson took care of marketing and public relations, and Hayden was in charge of raising the $44,000 it took to build the house. "We realize Duke students are very involved," says Hayden, "but sometimes they need a little push to expand their involvement. Or maybe we pull in some who are on the fringe."

The construction was timed to coincide with Founders' Day weekend activities and intended as both a celebration of the tenth anniversary of Nannerl O. Keohane's presidency and a symbol of her administration's commitment to being a good neighbor. "This was a concrete way to give back to the Durham community and to celebrate her gift to us as a prime leader in the Duke-Durham relationship," says Sam Miglarese, assistant director of Duke's Office of Community Affairs. "To me, there's power to symbol, and I think the greatest feature of this whole project is its symbolism."